Decades ago, people worked to feed their families. The job wasn’t important, the money was, and this still occurs. As time progressed, there were more jobs and education opportunities, so careers became important. Contributing to a company was desirable. Individuals started to look carefully at their career and employer choices. Ask a 25-year-old employee if they’d like to work at the company until retirement. The answer will not be YES. If you hire well, you are a step ahead of your business competitors and the other people who are trying to hire great candidates. While we’ve increased our career savvy, we have not increased effective hiring. Resumes are perception and competencies do not mean an alignment to your job. Many still believe that they can ‘read’ a candidate to determine whether they’ll fit or not. There is incredible research that proves that this is not true. Repeat after me – you are not psychic.

Here are some other ridiculous ideas about hiring:

Hire by creating a set of competencies that are easy to measure and easy to verify.

Resumes communicate accurately what the candidate’s experience and skills are.

By building an Interview Template / Rubric you can predict a good applicant choice.

There are no short cuts, especially the ones above. We wrongly look for a great candidate that we admire and like instead of looking for the best person to fill the job. Our emotional response is habitual to predictable. For example, if I’m hiring a Database Administrator and I’m a people person, I’ll be drawn to the most fun DBA. This may not be the best match to the DBA job. If I’m not familiar with the job, I’ll be left to decide based on the resume, LinkedIn written by the candidate, and psychic readings. None of this works well.​In addition, there’s a little thing called Unconscious Bias. You aren’t aware of it, but little cues like who the person resembles, what colors they wear, or their speech patterns can remind you of other situations that didn’t go well or people you don’t like, creating a bias against the person without real data. “I just didn’t like him” is a common comment when this occurs. Here are some examples of biased hiring behaviors:

Letting one favorite qualification, trait or experience influence all others.

Letting one disfavored qualification, trait or experience influence all others.

Preference to people from certain demographics (places, ethnicity, beliefs, preferences).

Superstition, for example, the first is best.

Preference based on a candidate’s position relative to the others in the pipeline.

GREAT IDEA: RMA now has an Unconscious Bias 1.5 -hour workshop (face to face or webinar based). Contact Shawna.Moser@moserit.com for more info. ​